About gay vicars.

[VivaLeBeaver]

Now I admit I'm not religious so I don't really get the argument of breaking church law, etc.

But I think its crazy that in this day and age a vicar can be refused a licence to practice by the local bishop because he's gay.

I thought Christians were meant to be tolerant, compassionate, etc.

Its even more crazy when he wouldn't be working directly for the diocese but for the local hospital.

bbc news story

My experience of headinhands is that she will never, never concede a point -- she will never say, 'oh, I didn't know that', or 'ok, you have a point there', or 'yes, that's a reasonable reading of that passage'.

That's just personal attack and says nothing about the points I make. Either soundly dismantle my position or don't. Either my reasoning is valid or it isn't regardless of wether I'm a self-important narcissist or a saint.

violence was the norm

And god ordered a lot of it
dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/drunk-with-blood-gods-killings-in-bible.html?m=1

even if he did that head and meant it in the way you imply so what?

I just thought you thought your god had superior morals and ethics to us, but it would appear from your question that you don't.

the way I imply

The way it reads in fact.

I don't agree heads. I think you have to look at the historical context of the time. he helped the woman and the Jews were considered the chosen people.

you are still looking at today's values but society was different then.

bible.org/seriespage/faith-canaanite-woman-matthew-1521-28/

Things that seem offensive = only seems offensive because it's out of context

Things that seem nice and fluffy = meant what they say

Tell me, can you list what we can all ignore and what means what it says. (there'll be loads of Christians who dispute your interpretation. What a mess)

(It's still racist of course. A GP who spoke like that would still be in breach of his code of conduct even if he went on to treat her. Her daughter was being tormented by a demon, and he was umming and ahhring over her genealogy.)

could you have a look at the link, it explains things well. I am using Android and not easy to convert it.

alem I've heard the main apologetic angles for this passage. I think I said on the other thread that I first heard I it when talking to a white supremacist Christian, I was a mainstream Christian at the time. I probably would have fallen back on one of the same twists I've seen Christians use here. I would have forgotten about it after a while. Same way that the horrors in the OT were smoothed over 'well if he can logically square it then I should be able to'.

headinhands -- I apologise. I do find you a difficult interlocutor because you don't engage with the substantive points I make. I make relatively few posts because I try to think them through carefully, and I put quite a lot of work into them. But I should not have let that make me rude to you. I'm sorry for that.

I'd like to answer your points if I may. There's no evidence that racism is at work in this passage. For one thing, there is no concept of 'race' in the way that we understand it, and that has been developed since the Enlightenment, in the New Testament. There are peoples, certainly but they are not races in the way that we understand them. And racism is more than simply prejudice it is prejudice plus power. As a Jew, and thus a subjugated people, Jesus does not have more power than the Canaanite woman based on his ethnicity. To call it racism is to misunderstand the passage by anachronistically applying modern concepts to it which do not apply to the historical situation, and then choosing to ignore that historical context.

One last point. Jesus is not the 1st century equivalent of a GP. He heals people not because he is a one-man medical mission to the ancient near east. He heals because these are signs of who he is that he is the Messiah. To compare him to a modern day GP is a category error it's comparing kittens with granite paving stones.

I agree it is a difficult episode. And I would say it challenges us to think hard about our own prejudices and tribal loyalties.

Gods chosen people are/were the Jews.

God exists.
His rules exist
Still

People can choose to obey or not

It works that way round, not the other way round.

As I have said before God can do what he wants.
We have to adapt ourselves to Him, not the other way round!

thanks for explaining hand

I think nimmy sums it up well in her post.

I enjoy hearing that the OT wasn't written by god. I like to quote it to those Christians who say we must obey the rules in it. That would of course be silly if we knew they were written by ordinary people whose ideas were primitive because of their times.

All that nasty stuff, poisonous snakes etc is not God, it is Satan.

We'll have to add Ophidiophobia to the homophobia that Christians preach. :)

Of course those nasty bacteria were created by Satan too, but it must have been inconvenient before he came along. All those dead people and animals piling up and not decomposing. Nothing to eat either because without the whole system you can't have crops and possibly no oxygen to breathe.

Hey, it's kinda good that he exists isn't it. Maybe we could keep him and dump god?

Of course the OT is from God!

He wouldnt create the universe and then get his own book wrong!

evil and suffering is very difficult and I don't think Christians have all the answers.
we live in a fallen world and evil and suffering feature. horrible about the baby with disease.

This is only difficult if you purport to believe in an omnipotent and beneficent supreme being. If you do, yes. the problems caused by random suffering which a genuinely supreme being could easily avert are extremely difficult to reconcile.

There is however a relatively straightforward answer. Horrible things happen as a result, of genetic errors, natural disasters and the like just because they do and we haven't yet found a way to deal with them. They are nothing whatsoever to do with any supreme being because, well, there's no such thing.

Time for a bit of Epicurus.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

He is able.
He is willing sometimes
Evil comes from Satan

It's strange that the CofE of all churches goes so fundamentally against what is otherwise british law.

Some baker refuses to bake a cake for gays and it is splashed all over the news. But churches/other religious institutions discriminate left, right and centre and it's tolerated.

80% of people have some belief in God.
So that they know that laws should really be reflecting God, and not the other way round

Sometimes on mumsnet , I ask if I can pray for a person. It is rare that the person says no.
They may say that they dont believe, but theyare still ok about being prayed for.

I think that for some people, God is hope.

80%? Really?

It is not a matter of people being tolerant.
It is a matter of what God says.

Perhaps god could learn a thing or two about tolerance and morality from us mere mortals. It does some rather cruel to create beings a certain way, and then punish them for it.

A lot of this comes down to whether you believe being gay is an innate trait.

does it matter what you or I think? this has been looked at by medical researchers.

Matthew Vines, has written an excellent book on the subject of why he feels there is a biblical case for Gay marriage www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1601425163/ref=redir_mdp_mobile of course people are not all in agreement with what he says, but just the fact that many leading Evangelicals are feeling compelled to argue over it shows what a good case he makes.